Wittgenstein's Relation to Science and Ontology
This inquiry is a split off from the Philosophical Investigations discussion. There are basically two questions inter-related here to better understand Wittgenstein's philosophy, its implications, and possible opposing views to those implications.
1) What was Wittgenstein's stated ideas about science? I know he disliked scientism, but I always read scientism to be an approach to philosophical problems that make value-statements, and/or metaphysical statements of "reality" to have some rigorous logical proof, when in fact most of the problems presented are simply knotted, tied-up language games.
However, that is more to do with philosophy proper, and less to say on the scientific method/science proper itself. What were his ideas on the verity of scientific "truths" about the world?
2) Did Wittgenstein believe an ontology of the world was possible, or was everything language-games? In other words, is all epistemology or is there ever room for accounting for an ontology?
3) If Wittgenstein did believe the foundations for any human endeavor is only wrapped up in language games, forms-of-life, hinge-propositions, etc. and the knotty problems that arise from them, then it may be the case he did not have much patience for realism, the idea that there is some underlying ontology outside the human schema. Perhaps he was a realist, but maybe more of a skeptic, there was an ontology, but it can never be conceived. Epistemology always comes first here. Speculative Realists might then consider Witt very much in the influence of the Kantian "counter-revolution" of maintaining epistemology above all else in philosophy.
Speculative Realism tries to counter the epistemological turn that they see in represented by Kant's transcendental philosophy. One of the main ideas is science cannot help but prove something is going on beyond humans, that humans can roughly grasp what is the case, and that it is showing something that is beyond human conception, though human conception is always a factor in understanding this ontology.
What are some of your opinions on how Wittgenstein's philosophy fits in relation with Speculative Realism?
@Sam26 @Fooloso4 @Metaphysician Undercover @fdrake You may have some ideas here.
1) What was Wittgenstein's stated ideas about science? I know he disliked scientism, but I always read scientism to be an approach to philosophical problems that make value-statements, and/or metaphysical statements of "reality" to have some rigorous logical proof, when in fact most of the problems presented are simply knotted, tied-up language games.
However, that is more to do with philosophy proper, and less to say on the scientific method/science proper itself. What were his ideas on the verity of scientific "truths" about the world?
2) Did Wittgenstein believe an ontology of the world was possible, or was everything language-games? In other words, is all epistemology or is there ever room for accounting for an ontology?
3) If Wittgenstein did believe the foundations for any human endeavor is only wrapped up in language games, forms-of-life, hinge-propositions, etc. and the knotty problems that arise from them, then it may be the case he did not have much patience for realism, the idea that there is some underlying ontology outside the human schema. Perhaps he was a realist, but maybe more of a skeptic, there was an ontology, but it can never be conceived. Epistemology always comes first here. Speculative Realists might then consider Witt very much in the influence of the Kantian "counter-revolution" of maintaining epistemology above all else in philosophy.
Speculative Realism tries to counter the epistemological turn that they see in represented by Kant's transcendental philosophy. One of the main ideas is science cannot help but prove something is going on beyond humans, that humans can roughly grasp what is the case, and that it is showing something that is beyond human conception, though human conception is always a factor in understanding this ontology.
What are some of your opinions on how Wittgenstein's philosophy fits in relation with Speculative Realism?
@Sam26 @Fooloso4 @Metaphysician Undercover @fdrake You may have some ideas here.
Comments (125)
He accepts that there are facts, but facts do not determine concepts. We do not have the concepts we have because the facts are as they are, but if the facts were not as they are our concepts would not be as they are.
The closing remark refers to Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Elsewhere he says:
If we look at species as kinds then we construct our picture of the world, or some aspect of it, in accordance to it, and attend to those facts that conform to this way of looking at things. But if we regard the differences between species as a matter of degree or variation then we begin to take into account facts that were previously overlooked or disregarded. We begin to see not only species but a great many other things differently. There is no fixed, unchanging order to life.
What are we to make of the following?:
Is this an ontology? Yes and no. Grammar does not reveal the being of things as they are, but as they are for us, that is, how we regard them, what they mean for us. This is not the noumenal-phenomenal distinction. It is not metaphysical. Wittgenstein is not concerned with the question of how things are in themselves, but rather with what we say and do. The essence of something, what it is to be what is it, means it's place in our form of life. It is in that sense not fixed and unchanging.
Why do you say that this is "not metaphysical"? To make a distinction between "things as they are", and "as they are for us", is to make a metaphysical assumption. If the point of interest is "as they are for us", this makes the assumption no less metaphysical.
The point is, he is not making the distinction between "things as they are", and "as they are for us" nor investigating that distinction.
But isn't the principle of "as they are for us" rather than "as they are for me" for example, a metaphysical principle?
I do not want to be too black and white thinking with Wittgenstein. His approach is an interesting tool to look at meaning and language, but it is easy for it to consume all other approaches. For example, this thread right now can be considered a language game. In fact, forums like this and the internet in general are really good examples of language games being played out in real time, very quickly. This thread set out some questions, that I hoped some other philosophy language-game users might participate in and play. We might come in with slightly different terms for the same thing, we might start talking passed each other. Eventually, there may be an evening out, where we start generating rule-following patterns such that meaning becomes more useful for our conversation, etc. etc.
This idea is interesting if played out across all forms of life, many areas of human interactions. The science language-game is certainly something where let's say Leibniz and Newton were both going at a problem with a different perspective, but eventually, they can be seen as the same thing. Science in general has come to use certain terms in certain community-minded ways that are agreed upon. Violations of this wold take terms out of context, sense, and put person at risk of being considered not playing the language-game correctly of that community.
However, how far does this conception of epistemology go in understanding scientific facts? Clearly there are principles that have better predictive powers and more complex/powerful technological usage than other language-games and forms of life. What does that say about the actual results of the science, and the fact that the very results informs the community on how to change perspectives/terms accordingly? It seems a truism that language-games amongst participants are "useful" for the context of a community. But that may lead to a metaphysical relativism. I know secondary literature tries to show that Wittgenstein isn't just a mere "pragmatist" or "relativist", but some of the ideas seem to indeed indicate this.
So yes, Wittgenstein, does seem to have a metaphysical stance of the "for us". But what happens when the "for us" bumps against patterns of nature that seem indicate the "not for us"?
I did not say anything about a principle. I do not recall anywhere where he discusses the distinction. If you can cite where he does then perhaps we can discuss it.
Well, there is the bigger issue of how is the "for us" even a real perspective, when everything I apprehend is "for me". Language-games appear to me, to create the "for us". But maybe it's the case that there must already be such a thing as "for-us" in order for a language-game to even come into existence. If it's the former which is the case, then language-games are completely directed by purpose. If it's the latter which is the case, then the underlying "for us" is what directs the language-games rather than the "for me" (purpose).
As he says in the first quote above:
When it becomes evident that our conceptual framework excludes important facts then we change the framework. Recognition of patterns of nature does not indicate something "not for us". It is, after all, "us" who have become aware of it.
From Culture and Value:
And:
You imply that Wittgenstein takes "for us" for granted. He does not, he recognizes a relationship between the existence of "for us" and the existence of language, and investigates this. Though it may not be classical metaphysics, this is metaphysics.
I do not have any idea how you got from anything I said that he takes for us for granted. The relationship between us and language is that language is our language. It does not exist independently of us.
He says:
This, of course, is an age old question. Neither the question itself nor Wittgenstein's response is framed in terms of Kant's distinction. The question of the harmony between thought and reality may be metaphysical, but Wittgenstein's answer is not. It is a matter of human practice. We do not discover connections we draw them.
The quote is consonant with the earlier one about grammar and essence.
How can one be skeptical of what goes on beyond humans if other humans are part of the epistimological language game that one plays in their own mind? How can someone be skeptical of the world but not other humans when other humans are part of that world?
It would make more sense to say that science cannot help but try to prove something is going on beyond the mind. It isnt logically consistent to be skeptical of the ontology of the world but take the ontology of other humans as a given.
Can you explain what you mean by "directed by purpose" vs. the "for us"?
But then what are these "learn new facts". Witty's Tractatus has a picture theory. There is something regarding "states of affairs". But what are these scientific "facts" that are presenting to us, as opposed to "social facts" of conventions and ways of doing things? Sure, we can conflate the science with the social, but then we are looking the other way in terms of what the scientific facts describe and do.
What do you think that means?
So what do you think would make more sense?
The issue is, as I described to Schop, how one gets from how things appear to me, to how things are "for us". This is a metaphysical issue, so being concerned with how things are "for us", is metaphysics. And Wittgenstein makes no attempt to skip the metaphysics to make it an epistemological issue.
Quoting schopenhauer1
We all act for purposes, this is will and intention. My acts are not your acts, nor are my intentions your intentions. To say that there is something "for us" implies a common intention between us. Where does this notion of a common purpose come from?
But can some empirical facts be different in regards to being part of the language game? Is there something science is showing us? Certainly we recognize patterns of nature. We contingently hit upon the Westernized formal science we have now. But is that just a language game we hit upon or something else? What are facts to Wittgenstein? Are there social facts vs. scientific facts, or is it all the same kind of conventionalism all the way down?
Yes, I think Witty implies with language-games that we have rule-following that forms by interacting and an interrelated, overlapping group of behaviors or ways of being in a community. So it organically arises out of the interaction process. Thus, a classroom and a workplace have ways of being, ways of doing things, norms, etc. It becomes a "for us".
But this goes much deeper and broader. We have actual language which arises from various language uses by a community, with various uses of that language by the community. If the whole Private Language thing is correct, then language itself isn't even really private, but an internalized "for us" directed at the self as if it was only "for me". That's my interpretation of it anyways. At the least, your intentions and goals, are originate in a language that is necessarily "for us". So you have individualized goals, they they are intrinsically caught up in the community. It is part of the language-game perhaps.
There are many examples of this question being shown to actually be about other problems. But I don't recall him blowing off the question as such.
Correct me if I am wrong.
The point I was addressing is the noumenal-phenomenal distinction, the distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they are for us. According to Kant, the categories of the understanding are universal. Whatever distinction you are making between things as they appear to you and how they are for us is another issue.
Have you read "On Certainty"? We can say "it is certain" about some things, and I suppose that this is as close as Wittgenstein gets to saying what a fact is. These are things which it would be unreasonable to doubt.
Quoting Fooloso4
OK, now suppose we take this Kantian position, and attempt to justify this notion you put forward about "how things are for us". This would require that something would have to appear the same to you, me, and everyone else included in "us". Then we could say that there is such a thing as how this thing appears to "us". So why is it that different people use different words to describe the very same situation? Or is it the case that since my perspective is different from yours, it really isn't the very same situation? There is no such thing as "how things are for us", and Wittgenstein points to this with his description of language-games.
You miss the point (or perhaps I do). The patterns are phenomenal or in some cases extrapolated from what can be observed. If the patterns were noumenal we have have no access to them according to Kant.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I am not sure what you are asking. The sciences have their language games and ways of doing things. Biology does not deal with the facts of astrophysics or astrophysics the facts of biology. There are, however, interdisciplinary endeavors. If one wants to converse across disciplines one must learn the language of the other disciplines.
Quoting schopenhauer1
In the spirit of his work, I will let you think about that for yourself.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Language games do not change the facts, but may represent or describe the facts differently or describe different facts. We may say that the floor is solid - we do not fall through, but a physicist will say that it is not.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is a great deal that science shows us. Have you seen the pictures from the Hubble telescope?
Quoting schopenhauer1
No, it is not just a language game and Wittgenstein never suggested that it is. It does, however, involve language games. The language games are not something we hit upon.The language-games of the sciences continue to develop. We have reached a point, where the language that developed in line with ordinary life and events is no longer adequate. Physics is largely mathematical.
Quoting schopenhauer1
He does not have a theory of facts if that is what you are asking.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The behavior of sub-atomic particles is not a social fact. The behavior of people is not a fact of particle physics. There are conventions in both but they are not of the same kind because they deal with very different matters, that is to say, very different facts. Perhaps someday there will be a unified theory that accounts for both, but for now they are very different.
Some may argue that facts are conventions, but as far as I can see, Wittgenstein does not.
schopenhauer1 introduced Kant into the discussion. I have no interest in justifying his position. I think the noumenal-phenomenal distinction is problematic. I also think the universality of mind is problematic.
As I said:
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, but Wittgenstein does investigate what "how things are for us" means, because "us" implies a communion which is closely related to communication, and this is one of his principal interests.
As I said already, either there is a "how things are for us" which is prior to language and necessary for the existence of language, or "how things are for us" is something which emerges from language. Which position do you think Wittgenstein supports?
Both :D.
Quoting Fooloso4
But is it just a difference in matters? Why do scientific facts obtain so well? You can say that it is similar to how a carpenter creates a masterpiece furniture, but is that the same? A man-made object created by someone, or a social convention, can be arbitrarily changed, and is contingent, varied. Any decision on it would be the freedom of the carpenter, or the architect. Perhaps the language of the woordworker is real in that community, but they are contingent conventions. This is not so with the science language game. There are constraints that nature is imposing, making the findings a necessity. It is nature forcing our hand. It moves away from contingency and hits on necessity. Wittgenstein's "forms of life" and "use" may not fit this scenario of science. You, in a really superficial way, can make an argument that humans are interested in pursuing scientific ideas, so in that sense is "for us", but the evidence gets more refined over time, more precise, more accurate, and leads to powerful results.
@Fooloso4 @Metaphysician Undercover @Valentinus
Probably a quote that would lean towards the Wittgenstein side would be:
[quote=Bertrand Russell]Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.[/quote]
This is almost a putting ontological realism on its head or mashing it with epistemological concerns. What is a truism about human capacity, is our inferencing ability. Mathematical and scientific exegesis and computation is just this ability refined over time in a certain place. As I've argued earlier, other animals follow patterns that lead to survival while humans recognize patterns that lead to survival through inference-making and accumulated social learning.
Can humans see anything "real" about the universe in the patterns, rules, regularities, and even the contingencies that come about through these regularities [dynamics of particles and forces (or their stand-in be they strings or what not) across time, increased complexity and interactions, and biological contingency]? Or is it just what we find useful for the human animal? I think here the context of useful is different than other language-games. Everything else can be conventionalized and gone a different way. Perhaps there are constraints on human nature though, that make things less free- constraints of survival, constraints of comfort-seeking, constraints of boredom in the human psyche. Perhaps, there are constraints of what are deemed desirable, etc. These can perhaps shape language-games to only form a certain way, and thus be necessitated in some way. I guess this could be a realism in a sort too. A realism of "human nature". It would be an epistemological constraint, necessitated by natural processes such as evolution on the human animal and human cognition specifically.
But I still think that is fundamentally different than how the observable evidence and technological gains fostered by modern science dictates certain understanding of reality. Both are related, and share family resemblences, but are not the same. One is a constraint on epistemology itself, our ability to go beyond our own language-games. The other is a constraint on how we can interact and conceive of the universe itself. The latter is a constraint that perhaps indicates something about the universe, outside human interpretations of it. Of course the default is that the mathematically-informed science is just an interpretation. But the interpretation corresponds with a greater predictive ability and technology which gives it a different characteristic far beyond other language-games and their heuristics, even accounting for other heuristics getting refined over time with accumulated knowledge.
I don't understand the meaning of your question.
I don't see how you can say "use" does not fit scientific language games. The reality of the world is inherent within "use", as what is used. So "for us" implies two things, the "for" implies purpose, usefulness, and therefore the reality of use, and the "us" implies a communion of people. These are the two underlying features of language games, the communion of people, and the purposes of those people making use of the reality of the world.
The "real" universe is simply taken for granted, as is often the case in philosophy, but it's a reality of use. Perhaps even the Kantian position that we have no access toward understanding the noumenal world is also taken for granted. What is available to us for study and description, is the way that we use the world. And this is most evident in language. But language is complex, because not only is it comprised of the reality of people using the world, it is also comprised of the reality of the communion of people. These are distinct "realities" understood by distinct principles, and it would be extremely difficult to analyze language in such a way as to separate the manifestations of each, within language. They are well intertwined.
Then youre saying that language games have an ontology themselves, no? An ontology of being in the mind and being on an internet forum.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The thing is that we could have the same predictive ability and technology with very different language-games. It is a matter of convention whether we consider that there is such a thing as atoms and subatomic particles or not, we could explain observations differently. Rather than saying "we observe such result because electrons were deflected by the magnetic field", we could say "we observe such result when we heat a metal surface in a vacuum tube and there is a magnet nearby".
We could frame the science language-game in a very different way, but in that language there would still be a name for the Sun, and ways to describe how the Sun moves in the sky, or how the sky and the horizon move while the Sun stays still, or how to find where the Sun is, there are conventions in the science language-game in the same way that there are in that of the carpenter.
To create his masterpiece furniture the carpenter would be implicitly applying his theories of how his tools work and how wood behaves in various situations, he just wouldn't call them theories because he would have internalized all that from his experience, each of his past experience with wood being experiments he carried out, from which he inferred generalities and expectations and predictions. Which is what scientists do, they carry out experiments, they infer generalities, expectations, predictions, and they share their results with one another.
The difficult question is how much of what we see is a convention? There are plenty of so-called optical illusions, where we see different things depending on our state of mind. Plenty of examples of so-called shared delusions, where something seen by an individual becomes seen by a few other people, while others don't see it and interpret it as a delusion. But then if that "delusion" spread to everyone it would become reality, and then how do we know we're not living in a shared "delusion", how do we know how much of nature is man-made, how much it is not nature imposing constraints on us but ourselves imposing constraints on ourselves?
In On Certainty Wittgenstein quotes Goethe:
We are social animals. The group and its activities comes first.
Why can't "merely" be used? It is in relation to ideas about realism, so would be appropriate in the context of scientific realism presenting some sort of ontology versus other language games. Essentially, it is about whether science indicates something that we are interpreting, different than what other language-games/forms of life are doing. My last post I said:
Quoting schopenhauer1
But again, your style gets in the way of your content. This whole making snarky remarks from the corner, isn't helpful to the conversation. If you have something actually interesting to say other than snarky remarks, say it. I am open to dialogue. But I know your style, I can predict another snarky dismissive response, so unless you want to surprise me, don't even bother.
Because it tries to insinuate a stupid distinction between 'language-games' and 'scientific realism' that is senseless and inattentive to what language-games are. Substandard ideas deserve substandard replies.
Ah yes, so all is language-games, don't try to debate it. Read Philosophical Investigations only. End of conversation. Sounds about as authoritarian as you can get, if you ask me. Also, limits any inquiry and methodology beyond Wittgensteins. You assume his approach limits all other talk, which is also shitty. You have trapped the fly again.
Wait, am I talking to a Wittgenstein bott? Holy shit, whoever programmed these responses, great trolling.
First there are constraints on the woodworker. The properties of the wood, the tools, the adhesives, the fasteners. There is also the woodworker's language that deals with these things and the working with the materials. It is a fact that pine is a soft wood and oak a hardwood. It is a fact that some woods are more prone to cupping and warping then others. It is a fact that some woods are more resistant to rot and insects than others. The terms used are conventions, but they are based on the activity of working with wood. The techniques are conventions but not independent of the tools that have been developed over time and what works and does not work.
Second, the findings of science are not a necessity. Science has a history. It has developed differently in different times and different places. The discoveries are not independent of the paradigms or the particular concerns of the investigators or the ability to fund their research.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The philosophy and sociology of science say otherwise. It has its own activities which are not independent of but different from other human activities.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think the same is true throughout human history. Many cultures have stories of a golden age that has been lost. This is tied to technological advances - agriculture was perhaps the most disruptive, tying people to a patch of land, but tool making and weapons is another.
So, by telling me to read the literature and not telling me, even just a small summary of what principle YOU think I am violating when discussing Wittgenstein, also shows your laziness. At least when I make a critique, I try to explain it. You can at least provide that. Otherwise, I can always claim the same and you could only defend yourself by further withdrawing into snarkiness, which would then keep proving my point. So we would always be at a standstill unless you explain your critiques leaving little room for me to misinterpret them.
You are not being clever by waiting for others to "hit" whatever point you want them to get, just obtuse. And the style shows more about ego than anything else.
Yes. Here is 242:
I will say a bit more about 242, but first:
Wittgenstein used the term "scaffolding" in the Tractatus to refer to what underlies both language and the facts of the world. (See the earlier quote about the harmony between thought and reality). The scaffolding, however, is no longer regarded as logical and is no longer thought of as underlying reality. Hence the complaint in 242 about abolishing logic.
It is our agreed upon, that is, shared or common, form of life that is the scaffolding. Our agreed upon definitions and judgments are part of our form of life. It is not simply that we share the same opinions, but that both our agreement and disagreement regarding opinions rests on our form of life. And this means, in part, not only that we agree on the definition of a meter but that there is a certain constancy of results when we measure. When the woodworker measures the length of a board it is not first one meter then two or three. It is not human agreement that determines that the length of the board does not change, but we agree when we say that it is true that it does not change.
But what are these facts compared to science? By simply saying it is a different human inquiry, so requires different language games, is misleading. The practical applications of use, the recreational applications of use, and simply the social applications of use, seem different in kind and not degree.
Quoting Fooloso4
This a good formulation of the argument that this particular POV is contrasting to and calling into question.
Quoting Fooloso4
So we have a tendency for improvement of our conditions through cultural accumulation. This can be applied to all types of spheres. However, there is something different when it is observing how the world is operating itself, perhaps. Yeah it can be "for us" because we have our epistemological tendencies for systematizing, but I guess I'm wondering if there can ever be an indication of the things-themselves through this science outlook.
Perhaps an extreme form of this, which I can certainly see as being considered "scientisim" is Max Tegmark's theory of mathematical realism. I do not see much justification for it, but it is an example that is definitely opposed to the more epistemological approach like that of Wittgenstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
The facts that concern the woodworker may overlap in some cases with the facts that concern someone doing materials science, but the woodworker's main concern is making something from wood whereas the materials scientist studying wood is concerned with the properties of wood and may have no idea what a scarf joint or a kerf is.
Quoting schopenhauer1
How so? Human languages developed in a world that is very different than what the sciences encounter and investigate. Physics can no longer be done without sophisticated mathematics. Biochemistry, although not as reliant on mathematical models, requires a vocabulary that is incomprehensible for those without the necessary education.
Quoting schopenhauer1
If that is the case then that supports the claim that they require different concepts and vocabularies.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Which POV? The one you have not been able to clearly articulate? I really am having a hard time trying to figure out what you are trying to say. What is it in that formulation that this POV is calling into question? What is the contrasting POV?
Quoting schopenhauer1
The farmer observes how the world is operating. The ships captain observes how the world is operating. The climatologist observes how the world is operating. The astrophysicist observes how the world is operating.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is "us" who observe and experiment and theorize and conceptualize. We see the world as we do not simply because it is the way it is but because we are the way we are. This holds for both our ordinary experience and for science.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The fundamental difference is that Wittgenstein considers mathematics to be a human invention, a human construct. Tegmark is a mathematical Platonist. I think they agree, however, that, in Tegmark's words: there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans.
The question then is not about the existence of reality but about how we are to understand it. Is there some way to understand it that is independent of us? Tegmark thinks there is because mathematics is independent of us. But even if that were the case, it seems to me that our knowledge of mathematics may be limited, that given its complexity we even with the aid of our most powerful computers will never grasp the whole of it.
So I first juxtaposed this "for us" approach against Speculative Realism, as they do not take stock in the "critical" approach which Kant really started and has been with us up through Wittgenstein and beyond. They think that philosophy should turn back to ontological speculation again, pace Leibniz, pace Decartes, pace Medievalists, pace Stoics, pace Aristotle, pace Plato, etc. They do not like this "critical turn" of epistemology limiting speculation, so to say.
Here is a really good article that might elucidate some of the concerns of the Speculative Realist and their critique of the critical turn. https://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/critique-and-correlationism/. This particular writer is interesting, because though he has sympathies with the anti-critical tendencies of the SR camp, he equally critiques their anti-critical tendencies as well.
I am having a hard time deciphering this. As I said in my initial post, I am not familiar with Speculative Realism. If you explained it, I missed it. "They" (I assume you mean the speculative realists) reject Kantian philosophy and want to return to ontological speculation, but then you say they also disagree ("pace") with Leibniz, Descartes, Medievalists, Stoics, Aristotle, and Plato. Perhaps you mean in accord with rather than politely disagree with?
The term ontological speculation is too broad for me to comment in general. It has a variety of meanings ranging from Aristotle's being qua being, to questions about God, to necessary and contingent beings, to universals, to hierarchies, to questions about physical objects, imaginary objects, and so on. Then there are questions about the activity and constraints on speculation.
Right. Or, as Wittgenstein expresses it:
No I meant the opposite, that those philosophers speculative philosophers.
This lecture by a speculative realist philosopher, Graham Harmon does a pretty good job explaining explaining speculative realism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK-5XOwraQo&list=PLttdsDToT81-Do8-J0iKiMwnT6fOgzYzM&index=5
I am not asking for justification or certainty, but to look at the idea that there are facts that we derived from experience, that we can perceive of the world, but also indicates something characteristic about the world and not the mind's interpretation of it perhaps. In other words, ontology.
Wittgenstein brings up a good point about the fact that we already assume a position by using certain tools and language-games. We have certain tendencies of human nature that can't really be disputed without going outside of common sense. Beyond this framework, there are the mutable language-games transforming our foundational common sense notions into the stuff of our projects and ways of life. Science is just one of these, used for a purpose in a community. Things in-themselves, can never exist then, so we can never make a statement about ontology, just human nature.
But does use itself tell us about an ontology of sorts? Is it merely contingent that humans have the common sense that we do? Evolution works contingently, but the rules themselves don't necessarily change with contingent circumstances. It will still be the case, that the species shaped by evolution may have echoes of what is the case in reality. Perhaps it was the necessary qualities of human epistemology that lead to and are connected with understanding the necessary qualities of ontology that shaped it. It is the anthropic principle on steroids here. Humans cannot help but understand the universe being what humans have been shaped by. It is the scientific and manifest images of Sellars combined.
Of course, then you have completely opposite points of view of someone like Meillasoux, Harmon, Brassier, and others who have ideas of a world foreign to human understanding yet real in their own sense. Harmon's is a bit more straightforward- he brings back the occasionalist idea that objects are withdrawn from each other but interact in some vicarious object that allows them to interact. Usually, these sorts of non-anthropomorphic realisms end up circling into themselves vis-a-vis panpsychism as objects have their own experience-ness that is beyond human experienceness but then also explains human experienceness.
True, but that is more about the nature of science. It is more the inferencing factor that is not so contingent.
Quoting leo
Right, that inferencing thing again. Scientists are turning it on principles of the world itself though, not just "for us" objects like furniture.
Quoting leo
It could be a shared delusion, but perhaps that things "work" is saying something about the world. A persistent delusion that inferences about the world in such a way that it is useful, and not just some chaotic mess, may tell us something.
How would you ever know? What comparison can you make in order to determine this? You can't compare our mind-dependent concepts to the mind-independent world-in-itself and say "we got pretty close that time". Hence the Wittgenstein quote I posted:
"But does it [an hypothesis] certainly agree with reality, with the facts? — With this question you are already going round in a circle."
The best that we can do or know, from within our all too human language-games, is "if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it". At least, that's my reading of it.
To dismiss the notion.
This is otherwise known as the tinted glass analogy. If the glass through which I look at the world is tinted, it will affect the way the world appears to me. Since all human beings have a similar composition we cannot avoid the problem by comparing with one another. Comparison actually shows significant difference, and confirms that the glass is tinted. The resolution is to just forget about understanding "the world", "ontology" and such, and focus directly on the glass itself. Until we completely understand the lens through which we view "the world" (and this for Wittgenstein is language), it is pointless to speculate about "the world", because we have no way of knowing what the lens adds, or takes away from 'the world".
Quoting schopenhauer1
You need to respect the dual purpose of language which I described above. Language may be used for describing things and understanding "the world", but it is also used for communion. These two are distinct and not necessarily compatible. If the prior, principal, or fundamental use of language is communion, then the evolutionary forces which have shaped language to be useful for this purpose, may have rendered it not so useful for that other purpose. This very aspect of language, that it may be shaped by competing purposes, makes it extremely difficult to understand. For instance, it has the capacity to express any purpose, so that I can tell you my purpose, and you can tell me yours, thus communication is enabled, but also it may be shaped towards one particular purpose (describing 'the world' for example). Notice though, that under this description, shaping language for a particular purpose is unnatural in the sense of creating an artificial language.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You display a huge problem here. You jump from "may have echoes of what is really the case", to 'the necessary qualities of ontology that shaped it". Do you recognize a problem with concluding necessity from a premise of probability? Suppose that the lens through which we apprehend "the world" consistently provides us with probabilities, and never provides us with necessities. Why would you start with an ontological premise of necessity, such as, there is necessarily something which shaped the lens? Since we cannot get beyond probability we must consider the possibility that the lens shaped itself. And until this is answered, there is the possibility that something extra-worldly shaped the lens, and so we have all sorts of possible ontologies like many-worlds and computer simulations etc.. We'd better just focus on the lens itself and not speculate about "the world" which you believe we are looking at through the lens.
I find Wittgenstein's examples of such irregularities interesting because he does not claim that such improbable things are impossible. From On Certainty:
And from Philosophical Investigations:
So I'm positive if I look back on these forums, I have seen you mention something about speculative realism. What is your take when compared to Witty's critiques? Is the whole SR adventure a big misadventure in your view? I take their critique of Kant to apply just as much to Wittgenstein.
Also, @fdrake I know you have mentioned speculative realism. Can you elucidate on this view, and how it matches up with Witty's critique, or vice versa?
Quoting Luke
Yes we can never get outside our human perspective. some SR think that objects interact in many ways that are not necessarily knowable to the human, but can perhaps be gleaned at through human lens.
I think, if people have time, they should watch this video of an actual SR philosopher, Graham Harman so that we can be somewhat on the same page as to what we are discussing. Feel free to skip through if you can only watch a little.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK-5XOwraQo&list=PLttdsDToT81-Do8-J0iKiMwnT6fOgzYzM&index=5
"Listen to this (hour long) lecture" is not a satisfactory response. The title of the thread you started is: "Wittgenstein's Relation to Science and Ontology". What does the lecture say about this? What does speculative realism say about this? I am asking you. A lecture or article or book might be cited in support of what you say but if we are going to discuss it then you need to state things in your own words.
You said:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I do not know if this is speculative realism or not, but it is something that I can work with. Wittgenstein rejects the idea that there are necessary qualities of human epistemology that lead to and are connected with understanding the necessary qualities of ontology. He rejects the claim that epistemology and ontology have necessary qualities. That things are as they are does not mean they must necessarily be as they are or will be.
One thing that Wittgenstein wants to show with his examples of imagined tribes is that what we know is part of our form of life. Different circumstances, different practices, and different concerns yield different concepts, different ways of seeing things. This is not, however, a causal relationship. There can be other ways of looking at something and different ways of seeing things.
Not without you doing more work, no I can't.
We can look back and see that worldviews change over time. For instance, people once thought the sky was a hard dome. The transformation of the concept of sky isn't something we decided upon. It was part of a large-scale alteration in worldview. Don't think of concepts as toys we play with and change by fiat. Declarations come downstream of seismic changes in outlook.
Good point.
What does that look like for you? Also realize, unfortunately, I have a lot of other stuff I have to do to not go homeless, so though I'd love to delve many hours into the minutia mongering of every math problem that ever existed, every proof, every speculative realist argument, every Wittgenstein quote, I have to do this cursory, more playful approach. I know.. shitty of me.
Edit: I don't want to be over dramatic here.. not going homeless, means working for money to survive.
Pick up the thread. Play about with it for a bit, see what strands come undone. Weave them back together into something coherent.
I did, but you said you didn't understand speculative realism. I thought I might not be doing a good job of explaining so I sent articles and videos from those more well-versed. However, my take on it is that there is something that humans can glean (hence speculation) that is going on behind the scenes. Yes we will always provide the humanistic ways of seeing the world (unless one is to concede to naive realism, which most aren't), but the speculation is hinting at what kind of things we may speculate is happening outside the anthropomorphic. So Harman (the guy in the video) has ideas of objects other than humans interacting with each other. He thinks objects have been deflated into the subjective experience of objects, and thus aren't given the attention they deserve as interacting entities that they are. He explains things like the fact that until I mentioned "floor" right now, you didn't even think about it, but it is nonetheless interacting. There is something going on, whether our POV draws attention or understands it, that is the world outside the human. Humans then, are just another interacting entity/object of the world, which is quite different philosophical space than the more correlationist approach of the Kantian turn into epistemology. Correlationism is the idea that
[quote=After Finitude/Meillassoux] ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’[/quote]
The SR camp would reject (for the most part) correlationism, and the critical approach of epistemology over ontology.
Further Levi Bryant explains
...
...
That is to say Kant is the originator of this correlationism, found right up to and beyond Wittgenstein, and to this day in both analytic and continental traditions.
Sorry for all the quotes, but this does a much better and clearer job than I can do on this subject, and essentially says what I need to say. Yes, I am a bit confused how Meillassoux breaks out of the correlationist vicious circle with ideas of "factiality", but ancestrality
Quoting Fooloso4
Though the "necessary ontology creates necessary epistemology" is just one version, no SR philosopher actually holds it. Some very "scientistic" and "neo-pythagorean" philosophers/scientists/mathematicians like Max Tegmark may have theories approximating to that, but SR usually conveys idea of "hidden but hinting" nature of the ontological reality (my phrase, not theirs). Meillasoux for example, has the view that everything is in fact radically contingent, because the way something is, can always be something else. Thus the only necessity is contingency. Thus, his ontological claim is some sort of hype-chaos of radical contingency.
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, there is a pragmatist streak here, despite claims otherwise. To use Wittgenstein phrasing, it at least has "family resemblances". Can the objective world outside of the social/mental sphere be understood outside of the criss-crossing web of a humans in their form of life? I know WIttgenstein's answer.
But is that all there is? Again, why do things seem to "work out" when math is applied to empirical investigations. The world is "for us" perhaps, but precisely because science was contingently constructed, we can say that it didn't have to go that way. Humans are "hitting upon" something that happens to correspond to certain epistemic human ways of being in the world.
It is just this tendency to posit a hidden world behind the world that Wittgenstein rejects. How does one peak behind the curtain? By imagining that there must be something going on and speculating that it must be this or that?
Quoting schopenhauer1
How does speculation avoid being something other than some way we see the world? It seems to be self-deluding - picturing some hidden way things must be and ignoring the fact that the picture one conjures or deduces is a human artifact.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Isn't this the way those who are not "doing philosophy" think of the world? Cats have kittens without ever interacting with humans. The universe seems to have gotten along on its own without interacting with humans for most of its history. The problem is not with recognizing this but with what we make of it, how we comprehend it. This is not an unmediated activity.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This may be the case for those who hold certain theories of subjective experience, but replacing one theory with another is still to see things according to the picture one paints. Hence, Wittgenstein's rejection of philosophical theory.
What does this mean? How can being be thought without a being that thinks, i.e., a subject? How can being be thought without language?
The absolute? The absolute is a conceptual construct. Whatever characteristics one might speculate it might possess is something one does within language, within a historically determined world-view.
This is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein. Once again: In On Certainty Wittgenstein quotes Goethe: “In the Beginning was the Deed”(402). The relation of other animals to the world is not via thinking and at its most fundamental level it is not for us either.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is similar to Wittgenstein's view, although it may be misleading to call it an ontology. It is, rather, the rejection of the claim that there is a necessary order. I do not know what the qualification "radically" means. Wittgenstein makes no ontological claim about "some sort of hype-chaos of radical contingency".
Quoting schopenhauer1
If you think it can then how?
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is a good question. One might speculate on the existence of a mathematical Platonic realm. One might claim that this realm is real, but this "realism" would be "imaginary realism". (If one wants to understand Plato the careful attention should be paid to the importance of the role of the imagination. The ever present objects of poiesis and the absence of objects of noesis - despite all the talk of Forms. Here we see the fundamental difference between Plato and Platonism.)
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think the attitude of Scholastic~Aristotelian realism helps cast some light:
From here. (Also see Jim Franklin on Aristotelian realism.)
How is this relevant? Because modern science comprises largely the 'quantification of those attributes of objects that can be abstracted to mathematics'. In this way, mathematical logic is applied to phenomenal objects, but only insofar as these are able to be quantified. So this enables us to apply logical methods, which ancient philosophy believed only applied to the domain of abstract logic, to empirical facts, through the application of universal laws to particular instances, by virtue of the universality of mathematical reasoning. That is the distinct characteristic of the modern mathematical sciences commencing with Galileo.
A quote from a book review of SR philosopher Steven Shaviro (https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-universe-of-things-on-speculative-realism/):
Quoting Fooloso4
Again, a quote says it more aptly than me from Critique of Shaviro (COS)
Quoting Fooloso4
A SR philosopher might reply [quote=COS]Shaviro's strategy in providing both a positive ontological and epistemological thesis is to push the anti-correlationist arguments one finds among speculative realist philosophers to their logical conclusion. Underlying these arguments is perhaps the central claim of his book: that "all entities have insides as well as outsides, or first-person experiences as well as observable, third-person properties" (104). For Shaviro, "the problem with Harman is that he seems to underestimate this latter aspect," the public, third-person aspect of entities. By accepting the two-sided nature of entities, Shaviro adopts a form of panpsychism, and one of the motivations for this move is that it responds to an alternative approach one finds among speculative realists whereby they overcome the problem of correlationism by purging thought from being (see 73). Both Meillassoux and Brassier, for instance, offer a version of this argument. Meillassoux calls for a version of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in order to show how an object can be "formulated in mathematical terms . . . (and hence) can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself" (citing Meillassoux, 74). Brassier goes even further and argues that our thought, including mathematical thought, "is epiphenomenal, illusory, and entirely without efficacy" (74). Whether a meaningful grasp of objects as they are in themselves is possible or not, both Meillassoux and Brassier are agreed on one thing, according to Shaviro, and that is "that they both assume that matter in itself -- as it exists outside of the correlation -- must simply be passive and inert, utterly devoid of meaning or value" (77). Thought and matter are thus put into polar opposition with one another -- or Meillassoux and Brassier continue to assume the validity of the bifurcation of nature (77) -- whereas Shaviro, following Whitehead, calls for a contrast of thought and matter, a contrast wherein everything entails both a subjective aspect and an objective aspect, an inside and an outside.[/quote]
Yes, but this is simply explaining the question again. Why is it so? If humans can't help but think this way, then why? Sure, we can say humans have a tendency to systematize, predict probabilities, find patterns, inference, etc. But then, why when investigating the world, do these properties work? Okay, we can say "evolution". But then what is it about evolution that allows for properties to work? Evolution works by way of differential survival rates. Thus, it may be said that it was advantageous for humans to think in these ways.
To use Heiddeger's ready-at-hand concept liberally, this might be about being's way of interacting with the world through non-reflective capacity. It would be "doing without thinking about it". This may be many types of animals without the recursive nature that language-syntax-conceptual capacities provide. With the slow but steady decoupling of the human animal from "just do" with more recursive modes of cognition, we get inferencing and social learning mechanisms that form the world into ever-present concepts. Thus "water in glass" presuppose a world composed of divisible concepts like water and glass. This conceptual decoupled cognitive capacity was useful precisely because of its ability to see the patterns of the world in a way that allowed for survival. Recognizing patterns becomes the reason why humans can survive. Thus the patterns weren't meant "for humans", humans wouldn't be otherwise without recognizing patterns as this is how survival differentials played out. Thus we couldn't help but recognize patterns, and accurately. Thus these patterns were prior to and independent of human conventionalizations of the best ways to recognize them.
So, Kuusela argues that Wittgenstein's contribution wasn't just a negative one. He takes Wittgenstein to hold, throughout his life, a conception of philosophy as a logical investigation. TLP, while preserving the basic assumptions of Frege's and Rusell's approach to logic, was trying to fill the gaps and solve the difficulties that this approach faced. Later on, he came to see as problematic the notion of a universal logical calculus or that logic's non-empirical status could be explained by thinking of propositions as being abstract entities. Kuusela claims that Wittgenstein continued to hold logic as a non-empirical discipline, even though it (i.e. logic) is able to take into account empirical facts about language users and their environment.
He sees Wittgenstein as trying to extend logic beyond calculus-based methods, by introducing alternative logical methods such as grammatical rules, language-games and a "quasi-ethnology". Kuusela takes Wittgenstein's late contributions to be a hybrid between "ideal" and "ordinary" language philosophies. In the sense that he still maintained a basic article of Russel's approach, according to which philosophical problems are primarily logical and are solved by logical investigations, while, at the same time, extending logic beyond calculus-based methods and into "ordinary" language-games, grammar etc. In that, Kuusela argues against Russell and others who viewed Wittgenstein's later thought as a curious kind of empirical linguistic anthropology and as an abandonment of his work on logic.
So, ultimately, under Kuusela's reading, Wittgenstein's late philosophy tries to fill in the gaps in what he took to be an impoverished conception of logic. Logical calculi preoccupied with grammatical form are useful in certain contexts but may not be as useful in others and certainly they are not all there is to logic. They are part of it. Wittgenstein's own methods, such as language-games, are different parts of it and the bulk of PI's investigations are examples of cases where the employment of logical methods such as language-games might be preferable to calculus-based methods.
There might be problems, philosophical or otherwise, where the idealizations of logical calculi do a good enough job. But ideal languages with fixed and precise rules are simplified descriptions of something far more complex and open-ended. Natural languages are not as simple as ideal languages, nor are they governed by such fixed and precise rules. Wittgenstein argues that some philosophical dead-ends are reached precisely because we're not using good enough logical methods and we end up describing our concepts as simpler than they really are.
Logical necessity, which makes no exceptions, is not explained solely by rules and conventions, they are not the source of necessity, even though language is an evovled spatio-temporal phenomenon for Wittgenstein. Kuusela names Wittgenstein's attempt to do justice both to empirical facts and logical necessity, non-empiricist naturalism. Empirical generality cannot account for logical necessity and universality, but empirical facts are nevertheless not irrelevant to logic. Regarding Wittgenstein's discussion of pain expression in the PI, Kuusela writes:
"Instead of using a rule or a set of rules as a mode of representing language use, §244 describes an aspect of language use by means of a natural historical picture or model. Importantly,this involves construing the notion of language use more broadly than as rule-governed use—which also throws light on the sense in which Wittgenstein’s methods do not involve a commitment to a theory or thesis about language use as rule-governed, or that it is always possible to describe language in terms of rules. Rather, the notion of rule-governed use is merely one of several related notions of the use of language that Wittgenstein employs"
With respect to how the use of "natural historical pictures" or "empirical facts" establishes logical necessity without collapsing into empiricism, Kuusela explains that:
"Accordingly, insofar as the employment of calculi and grammatical rules consistently with Wittgenstein’s method does not involve a collapse into empiricism, neither does the employment of natural historical pictures. The explanation why is now easy to state: none of these different kinds of clarificatory devices is used to make empirical statements, when employed for the purpose of logical clarification. The difference of the use of natural historical pictures in Wittgensteinian logic from empirical assertions can be further clarified with reference to certain formal features of the use of natural historical pictures, namely their manner of justification and their generality."
Wittgenstein's model is justified, not because it corresponds with empirical facts, but due to its clarificatory power, which makes comprehensible the object of inquiry (pain) without producing conundrums that other models produce. For example, Wittgenstein's model does not have to deny the possibility of knowing other people's sensations, like the model which takes sensation-language as naming inner states.
Since Wittgenstein is not concerned with empirical facts, he does not need to refer to a certain space or time when he brings up his examples. As devices of logical clarification, these examples are universal and necessary, just like logic. The gain here is that it manages to clarify language without having to postulate abstract entities (e.g. ideal languages) to which our natural language must conform to get it right. Wittgenstein turns the classical account on its head. The classical account just ignored the way language is actually used and sought to find the ideal which would dictate proper usage. Wittgenstein takes into account the way we talk in order to show the logic behind it, its grammar, by comparing language with calculi or games according to fixed and exact rules.
By employing these means of idealization in logic, we bring into focus and clarify certain aspects and uses of language which account for specific problems. But what these idealizations help us figure out does not hold just for this calculus or that language-game, it is true of our natural language which is the object of inquiry. That's a difference between logical and scientific modelling. In science, models are approximations of its object (nature or reality) in a way that logical models are not such approximations of its object (language). As Wittgenstein puts it:
"But if you say that our languages only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for a vacuum.—Whereas logic does not treat of language—or of thought—in the sense in which a natural science treats of a natural phenomenon, and the most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. But here the word "ideal" is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect, than our everyday language; and as if it took the logician to shew people at last what a proper sentence looked like"
When the scientist abstracts away certain features of reality to build her model, she leaves something out. What she presents to us now is not reality, she's not making ontological claims, anymore than cartographers do. Are maps ontological statements? Idealizations in science are methodological choices. Ideally, science would like to produce ever more accurate approximations of reality until they're not approximations (not that this is possible though). On the other hand, there's no such need or aim in logical modeling. According to Kuusela:
"For the descriptions of logic in idealized terms are not merely approximate clarifications in the absence of more proper clarifications. Rather, clarification by means of ideal languages constitutes a particular method for resolving philosophical problems"
"As outlined, unlike science logical clarification does not ultimately aim at a comprehensive non-idealized account of its objects of study. Due to their problem-relativity logical clarifications can remain idealizations, as long as they account for whatever is relevant for the problems at hand."
Or, in the words of Wittgenstein:
"Just as a judge treats certain cases as paradigms, so to speak as ideal cases, so too we construct ideal cases, grammatical pictures, in order to secure different perspectives in cases of philosophical dispute and to settle the conflict. We wish to investigate language solely from the point of view of a procedure governed by definite rules, under such an aspect. To a certain extent the method is similar to the one proposed by Boltzmann: describing a physical model, for instance a model of Maxwell’s equations, without making any claim that it conforms to something else. Rather, it is simply described, and then the resemblance will become evident to us. The model is none the worse for this. It is a thing in its own right, and it serves a purpose as well as it can. What Boltzmann accomplished by this means was a kind of safeguarding of the purity of his explanations. There is no temptation to falsify reality, but the model is, so to speak, given once and for all, and it will itself show to what extent it is correct. And even where it does not do so, it does not thereby lose its value.It is in this sense that one can say: We have no system. That is, there is no possibility of another’s agreeing or disagreeing with us; for we really indicate only a method. It is as if Boltzmann’s model were simply placed beside the phenomenon of electricity and someone said: ‘Just look at that!’."
---
* according to which "grammatical statements articulate conditions of intelligibility for the employment of concepts, clarifying what is necessarily assumed in their use and what their possible uses are."
Quoting 2019
Schopenhauer1 appears to be trying to draw some sort of ontological conclusions from this Wittgensteinian perspective. If natural languages are not rule-based, and rules only emerge in our attempts to produce ideal languages, then where do the patterns (which Shop refers to), and order, which is found in natural languages, and in nature in general, come from? Can we conclude that the patterns and order which we observe as existing in the natural world, are not rule-based?
My response is here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/295093. Anyone who wanted to further comment on this particular response to Wafarer is found in that thread as Wayfarer chose to continue the discussion there, which may be more appropriate.
There may be a bit of this in Witty in regards to language when it comes to research on the origins, neuroscience, etc. But he was getting at a priori understanding at a much broader level, which from the 10,000 ft. level can be considered a legitimate move when characterizing what is going on. He is being "meta" here of empiricism, logic, and ordinary language and the approaches of these in themselves and combined.
Quoting 2019
Yes, science never has to be "exact", just point the way of correlation. But the fact that this correlation is there, is in fact, "saying" something itself. That is my theme in this thread, or at least what I am currently entertaining for a point of discussion here.
How do we reconcile logical necessity with his remark that the rules of grammar are arbitrary?
Language has no single purpose, but it could not serve many of its purposes if it did not have a logical structure, that is, if what is said does not make sense. There is something arbitrary about language and something non-arbitrary about the grammar or logic of language. This does not mean that there is a fixed logical structure underlying language, but that all language-games have a structure. This is not an empirical claim but a logical one.
i) the common usage of the word "grammar" to refer to the conventions of linguistic protocol.
ii) The paradox that some form of linguistic protocol must be used if grammatical sentiment is to be communicated - which leads to verbal contradictions in cases where we say that a particular word or set of words has meaning but cannot be given a verbal definition.
This reminds me of ideas of the Chomskean sort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
As I understand it, Wittgenstein is not claiming that there is a universal grammar, but that any grammar must make sense.
One might imagine a language game in which "Milk me sugar" makes sense, but the grammar of the invented game would have to make clear what this means, how the phrase is being used in that game, what one is supposed to do with it.
No, I wasn't suggesting he does, just the idea that grammar might have universal elements possibly due to how cognition in humans generally works. Chomsky's UG is definitely of a different language theory than Wittgenstein's. It does not mean I am discounting it, but giving another theory. I don't like only viewing these problems with one strategum. For example Quine, Russell, Chomsky, and others represent a different approach, at least how I interpret it. Actually any one of these isolated theories can be combined. Witty doesn't have to be contrary to any other theories, but they can accord but apply to different areas or levels of investigation of the large phenomenon of language.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, phrases must make sense in their use-contexts. What makes science interesting is falsification. Falsification and the ability to get a result other than prediction tells us something. The data doesn't necessarily accord with the initial logic. However, that any data can be systematized can then subsume this position back to plain old epistemological constraints. This is true, but a lot of what is predicted is not what would be readily apparent to a common sense worldview.
Okay. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether someone thinks that what is being said is roughly the same thing in two different ways.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Maybe. One issue I have with this is that it compounds interpretative problems. instead of dealing with the interpretation of one thinker we are now dealing with the interpretation of two or more.
This says nothing more than "if there is order in the universe, it must be a logical order". But this is the "classical account" that 2019 refers to, which Wittgenstein turns on its head. It must be turned on its head because it puts the horse before the cart. Clearly, logic is derived from, or comes from language. Therefore there is no such thing as logic prior to language, nor was there logic when the first language-games started to exist.. Furthermore, the structure or order which underlies natural language games, just like the structure and order which underlies the entire universe, cannot be attributed the property of "logical", because there was no such thing as logic when these things came into existence..
We have to be careful here not to mince words. There is this sense that people are using Wittgenstein as an escape hatch for any sense of meaning. One can always be accused of not playing the language-game right, and thus "making no sense". There could be a sense that languages had to conform to some sort of coherency while it was developing. Evolution also plays by certain rules, dictated by the necessity of survival for biological organisms. Also, it could be said that humans are a "symbolic species", the groundwork for conceptual thought itself is already there, and the background for which language-games play out. So in all these senses, @Fooloso4 could have a point. Presumably, he is not talking about logic in the formal sense, but a structuring that takes place in the development of language.
Grammar is a logical order. It is not derived from language, it is integral to it. There can be no language that is not a logical language.
... Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How can there be a language-game that is not logical? How would anyone know what anything means? All language-games are logical. It is not a question of which came first. Even the builder's language is logical.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The structure or order is logical. What would an illogical order be if not disorder?
I don't think so. Evolution does not follow any rules.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What are you saying, that evolutionary processes follow some sort of informal logic? Who would have been carrying out this logical thinking which took place in the early development of language?
Quoting Fooloso4
I think we already went through this in the other thread and I demonstrated that this is a mistaken view. Logic requires language, but language does not require logic. Watch a baby learn to talk, that child is not using logic. The child learns to talk before the child learns to be logical. We reason with language, so language is required for reasoning. And we cannot reason without language. Language has given us the tool required for reasoning. How could that language which came into existence prior to reasoning be a logical language?
Quoting Fooloso4
Why must one know logic to communicate? Many animals communicate without using logic. It's not a question of knowing what something means, because meaning is use in the Wittgensteinian context, so there is no necessity for "what" something means. It's a question of being able to communicate. Your assumption that a language game must be logical is unfounded, just like you assumption that to use language requires that we know "what" is meant. Knowing-how does not require knowing-what.
Quoting Fooloso4
Logic is a process carried out by human minds. There could, for example, be an order which the human mind, due to its limited capacity, could not understand. This order would not be logical, nor would it be disorder. The infinite order escapes the grasp of the human mind with its finite logic. Logic is based in definition, and therefore relies on definiteness, whereas order goes far beyond, to the indefinite, the infinite. So it is necessary to conclude that there is order which is not logical order.
:rofl:
No, you argued that it is a mistaken view. I don't know if anyone but you found it persuasive.
Your basic misunderstanding in this post is based on your conflating the logic of language with formal logic and reason. If you can get that straightened out then you should be able to see how misguided your post is.
If, as usual, you are convinced you are right, that Wittgenstein is mistaken rather than you being mistaken about what Wittgenstein is saying, then so be it. I am not going to try to convince you otherwise.
No, the issue is that if we assume that an animal must use logic, or reason, to do something like communicate, then we'll find that logic must pre-exist communication. And if we analyze why it is that we believe logic is required for such an activity, we'll find that logic is required for, and therefore must pre-exist the activities of all living beings. Then we'll need to believe in pan-psychism because it will appear like life comes about from matter using logic in its actions' .
Quoting Fooloso4
There is no such thing as "the logic of language". And Wittgenstein does not refer to any such thing, you are making this up, to support your misunderstanding. Did you read 2019's post, which is what I was replying to? Logic is an idealized use of language, it is a type of use, the use of language for a particular purpose, "...rule-governed use is merely one of several related notions of the use of language that Wittgenstein employs...". if you make "logic" refer to something which underlies all language use, then you are not maintaining consistency with Wittgenstein. You are using "logic" in a way which is outside of the boundaries which Wittgenstein has drawn for it.
Do you recognize the difference between something following rules, and rules being used to describe a thing? In the former case, the rules pre-exist the thing, and the thing "follows" the rules. In the latter case, the rules are produced to describe the thing, and therefore "follow" the thing. In the case of evolutionary theory, the rules describe the processes and therefore the rules follow the thing. The evolutionary processes are not following rules.
Then I suggest you read it again, carefully , without your assumptions about what logic must be.
So here we are playing language games. As you know, the term "rules" has many uses in our constructed language games. By rules, I mean a kind of set of patterns based on constraints. That is how I am intending to use it. Evolution, like all other phenomena, has constraints on its system and its elements. You have the constraints of time and place, the constraints of how DNA, genetics, and cellular biology works, constraints on behavior, constraints on survival in general. All these constraints prove to produce similar patterns of morphology, behavior, and survival-mechanisms in animals repeatedly over and over. Many traits are conserved or produce similar traits from different starting points. Hence we have mechanisms like the Red Queen Hypothesis, sexual selection, divergent and convergent evolution, etc. The processes eventually shake out into patterns based on these constraints. So I meant a kind of structuring logic based on the constraints of the system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh c'mon, this rather uncharitable interpretation. Evolution mainly works through differential survival rates. And as explained above, these do indeed create a kind of structuring system- an informal logic of its own, if you will. Systems can produce patterns of action. These are language games again. I am not using logic in the "formal logic" sense nor even in the "general inferencing" sense, but more of the arrangement and structure of a system sense. The "logic" of how a human heart works, or the "logic" of evolutionary mechanism clearly means something different than, "he is practicing logic".
Explained above again. These are exactly the types of error Witty would hate. You know what I meant, I would think based on the context. No, there is no pre-set "rule" evolution is following. However, constraints of nature, cause similar processes (one can say "rules") that allow for various similar patterns. Evolution may be contingent, but it is a constrained contingency, that does not have hard-and-fast results (necessity), but neither is it limitless possibility (chaos). It has a sort of logic in its mechanisms and results based on these conditions and constraints.
My assumptions of what logic is, are derived from Wittgenstein's descriptions. So I see no point in dismissing these assumptions for your assumptions of what logic is, when yours are inconsistent with Wittgenstein, because the thread concerns what Wittgenstein thought. If we weren't discussing Wittgenstein's position in this thread, I might take you up on your suggestions of what logic consists of.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I really do not see how a constraint is a rule. That makes no sense to me. I agree with what you say about constraints, time and place are constraints, and all the physical features of genetics, DNA, etc. are constraints. These may all be classed as the particulars of the circumstances. But how do you construe the particulars of the circumstances as rules?
Quoting schopenhauer1
We can analyze the system using logic, and produce some laws which describe the actions of the system, but these laws are descriptive. They do not actually structure the system, so it's inappropriate to say that the system "follows" these laws. The laws describe the system, the system is not following the laws.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I can see how a system might produce patterns of action, and that we might understand these patterns through logic, but I do not see how you can say that there is any "informal logic" within the system, governing the actions of the system. To say that the system has "an informal logic of its own" which is creating the patterns of action, is to say that the system has a mind of its own, because only minds use logic to govern actions.
You might do as Fooloso4 appears inclined to do, and define "logic" in a way which is completely inconsistent with the way that Wittgenstein uses it, but in the context of this thread, what's the point in that?
Okay, then don't read it again. I would suggest that you look more carefully at what Wittgenstein actually says about logic, subliming logic, logic and grammar, and so on, but I suspect you would prefer to stick with your assumptions. So there is nothing left to say.
I've read 2019's post twice fully, and some parts three or four times now, and I've looked very carefully at what Wittgenstein says about logic. I've found nothing to support your claim that there is such a thing as "the logic of language". So there is actually much for you to say (despite your claim that there is nothing for you to say). You could attempt to justify that claim, or admit that you are mistaken, and proceed toward changing your opinion. If you read closely PI 81 and 98, you'll see that Wittgenstein believes that there is an order of perfection, which underlies all language use, but we cannot say that this order is a logical order because logic is based in an ideal, and this order is based in a perfection which is other than an ideal.
Quoting 2019
And:
Quoting 2019
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
One is on the very brink of a misunderstand if he thinks that what we were talking about in logic were an ideal language. Our logic, that is, the logic of language, is not logic in a vacuum. It does not exist on its own. It is not independent of the language-game and thus not some one, universal, invariant thing.
The perfect order Wittgenstein refers to in §98 cannot be an illogical order.
There is no one universal order that underlies all language.
FYI - There's an interesting debate about this in the linguistics community: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1269
In your quotes from 2019, you missed the conclusion. The necessity of logic, logical necessity is not rule based, it is language based, and "Importantly this involves construing the notion of language use more broadly than as rule-governed use...".
The problem with your interpretation is that you fail to respect the fact that the necessity of language is "necessity" in the sense of "needed for the purpose of...". And so the necessity of logic, being language based is a form of "needed for the purpose of" something. Now when we turn to the natural world, to observe the order and patterns which exist there, we cannot assume that they were created with intention, "for the purpose of" something.
So language, having a necessity in the sense of "for the purpose of..." is artificial, and logic obtains its necessity (logical necessity) from this (needed for a purpose). But this excludes the possibility of "natural languages" and renders Kuusela's interpretation a little off track. And despite the fact that Wittgenstein bases logical necessity in the necessity of language, "needed for the purpose of...", he makes no attempt to describe "needed for the purpose of" as a logical necessity. And so Kuusela's description which sees Wittgenstein as extending logical necessity downward into the necessity of language (needed for the purpose of) is misguided, mistaken.
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, logical necessity does not exist in a vacuum. It is grounded in the necessity of language-games, "needed for the purpose of...". The misunderstanding which we are on the brink of, is the danger of turning things around such that the necessity of common language might become grounded in the necessity of logic.
Quoting Fooloso4
Of course this perfect order is not illogical, but neither is it logical, it is alogical, completely outside the realm of logic, just like "becoming" is outside the logical principles of "being and not being". The necessity of logic is derived from the necessity of language, "needed for the purpose of...". The "necessity" of "needed for the purpose of..." extends much further than the logical "necessity", it is a "necessity" having a much wider application, and broader meaning than logical "necessity", such that it includes things which cannot be said to be logical. Therefore the fundamental order which is found at the basis of "needed for the purpose of...", cannot be a logical order.
Interesting. I recall some heated arguments between followers of Chomsky and followers of Wittgenstein.
Again, because we are playing language-games. Constraints in nature, cause there to be patterns. If we want to call it n-rule instead of strictly "rule" because it is not a human-created, top-down creation, then that is fine. We are just debating the meaning of how a term can be used then.
What I am positing in this argument is that humans evolved by these very constraint-produced patterns, and not only that, have abilities such as inferencing powers, that were in some way directly or indirectly evolved (whether specifically selected, sexually-selected, by exaptation, or a combination of all three). This inferencing power, along with other cognitive capacities like social learning, which coincided with our language generation, has given us the ability to recognize the very constraints and resultant patterns that were involved in our very evolution.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This makes no sense to me. The system is shaped by the constraints. This shaping by the constraints, is "following laws". This version of "following laws" does not need intentionality, simply actions that are constrained to create certain probable outcomes and patterns. Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So what if I am using it in a way that Wittgenstein is not? This is a different language game. What I am doing is explaining/describing how our pattern-recognition powers, like inferencing powers, were created by pattern-generating phenomena from constraints, that allowed us to see those very patterns that created us. We perhaps could not help but be a creature that recognizes patterns. The other option of nature would be to strictly follow those patterns of behavior unreflectively, or non-recursively rather, which is more-or-less the instinctual abilities that other animals have rather than the inferencing/social learning/pattern-recognition pattern abilities that our species has. It just so happens that mathematically-derived empricism has applied, refined through verification/falsification, and accumulated methodologies of our pattern-recognition and inferencing onto the world itself instead of a particular subset of other use-contexts and has given us results we would not have initially expected. We can see these results in applying prior known maths/logic to new phenomena that explain observations and technological results.
Constraints do not necessarily cause patterns. The constraints must be designed, or systematic to cause patterns. So you are overlooking the real cause of the patterns, which would be the design of the system of constraints, and you are assigning the cause of the patterns to the constraints themselves. So we are not just debating how a specific term, "rule", may be used, we are discussing how it is that a pattern may come to exist. Constraints may be completely random, there is no necessity in the concept of "constraint" which would require that constraints are ordered. So if it comes to be, that constraints are arranged in such a way as to create a pattern, we need to account for the reason why this has occurred. It doesn't suffice to say that the constraints are following a rule.
Quoting schopenhauer1
See, here you are talking about "shaping by the constraints". But the constraints can only cause the existence of a pattern if the constraints are themselves arranged in a particular way. It doesn't make sense to say that the constraints are "following laws" or that they arrange themselves in such a way so as to create a pattern.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It seems like I need to emphasize the fact that a constraint is not a law, or a rule. A constraint is a particular physical thing an obstacle or an object of restriction. In order that constraints might produce a pattern they must be arranged in such a way so as to do that. Recognizing that there are patterns, and that the patterns come about through constraints, and even describing the existence of those constraints in terms of laws or rules, does not address the reason why the constraints exist in such a way that allows them to be described by rules. The fact that the arrangement of constraints required to produce a pattern may be described by rules, does not mean that the arrangement of constraints required to produce that pattern is caused by rules.
You are just going down the rabbit-hole of language games further. So how descriptive do you want me to be? I agree with your explanation here that it is not just constraints but interaction in the system. Terms can be used to construe more than the word it represents. In fact, even if I gave a much more detailed description, I wouldn't even exhaust that phenomena anyways. Actually, that was a very Wittgenstein point I just made :wink: .
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is just term-mongering. I already explained how I was using the term in a different way than you are defining it. I've already addressed this and said you can call it n-rule if you wanted. I don't really care.
The ontological point was that the systemically-defined, constraint-patterns are intelligible to humans. Sure we can say that anything that makes sense to us, makes sense to us because it could not be otherwise. But it can be said, it makes sense to us, because a humans evolved in a way where pattern-recognition, a part of the human capacity to survive, turned its capacity on the broader phenomena of the world itself, they could not help but find these patterns, originally used for general inferencing abilities in other contexts.
“Term mongering” is just term mongering. Is it that we fashion our terms anew like some birthed child? Are our terms the purest of the pure?
Rabbit holes are useful given that Alice’s rabbit as particularly concerned with TIME!
I’m just terribly confused by almost all of the comments in this thread. It appears to me that you’re all robots toying with the idea of emotional content yet forever blind to any felt experience - life is merely streams of numbers? It could be so, yet the certainly of claiming otherwise seems a little arrogant to me.
Through the temporal disregard toward language we’re certainly able to reveal that LOGIC, the pure mathematical certainty of X being X not not X, universally true (yet such ‘universal’ is confined to a set understanding). If a rabbit is a rabbit it is not a dog, yet if a rabbit IS a dog, then why have two terms for one entity? It is a matter of different relations given in time not a pure logical form.
Our application of language to matters of TIME - planning what to do from moment to moment based on what has happened - reveals the unbound ‘moment’. It is merely a glorified assumption of temporal reduction; it is certainly practical though. This conscious appreciation of time we can compare to vision thus ... if locked in room our visual ‘reach’ is bound by the extend of the walls around is. Time acts in the same conscious manner and language traps it so and cuts it into pieces of sensible notions (called ‘concepts’). Remove the walls and we can see the mountains on the horizon, remove words and we’re bound to the idea of a ‘moment’ - a reduction of plurality to a singular ‘measure’ (a measure which no ruler can encompass; obviously!)
Our temporal appreciation is bound in our memory. The viciously simplistic net of ‘language’ only makes items of experience seem complete.
The most foolish appreciation of time is due to the “excluded middle” principle. Yet do any of you see this? In my experience people generally consume themselves in relativism and/or reductionism. The binary thought can be applied to ‘future’ and ‘past’. Either we are in the future or in the past, or such distinctions are merely matters of convenience rather than real.
Language is the ordering and/or expression of experience. Language can extend our experience of TIME like removing the walls. With language we stretch ourselves beyond some delusion of ‘moment’ and regard our being in a none measured manner, beyond the boundaries of rulers. It is within the confines of such ‘language’ (ordering) consequences that a possible form of measure becomes apparent through temporal appreciation (knowing ‘change’ as an idea - a possible, and necessary, circumstance of consciousness).
We are what we don’t ‘know’. We ken things yet we ‘know’ nothing. For us to map one-to-one means no recognition. A congenially blind human ‘knows’ sight yet cannot ken sight unless they ‘un-know’ sight.
We refer to ‘knowledge’ as something other than the above though. Knowledge for us, day-to-day, is temporal apprehension of otherness. As we contemplate time the idea of moment is crushed into non-existence, yet when we claim dominion over the ‘moment’ temporal apprehension collapses. Basically talk of ‘relativism’ is just willful ignorance to stave off the excluded middle we childishly call ‘the now’.
Note: No questions allowed. I’m an idiot and proud of it.
It seems we are talking about completely different ontological points. You are talking about the reason why patterns make sense to us, and I am talking about the reason why patterns exist. As I explained, we cannot say that patterns exist because natural things follow logical rules or because of constraints, or something like that. So I don't see how you can argue that natural things make sense to us because they are following logical rules, or because of constraints.
Let me start from your side. I agree that patterns make sense to us because we have evolved to recognize them, and that this means that recognizing patterns serves some evolutionary purpose which evolutionary theory designates as survival. But I still see a gap here between "recognizing patterns serves the purpose of survival", and "the patterns make sense to us because the natural things are following rules of constraint". We can only make conclusions in relation to your premise, that the patterns make sense to us because making sense of them serves us in relation to survival. How do we cross this gap (which is similar to an is/ought gap), to say something about the patterns themselves, when our premise says something about what serves a purpose? We need another premise which relates what is, to what serves a purpose.
Right, that is a theory I posited is that, "what serves a purpose" is telling us "what is", and the confirmation is through accidental (contingent more accurately) language-game of math-derived science.Our inferencing capacities, needed to recognize patterns to serve the purpose of survival. What did not need to take place was that we needed to have math/science/modern technology as it played out. However, this inferencing/pattern-recognition/social learning/linguistic mechanism for survival provides the underlying ability to understand patterns of the world itself through methods of falsification, observation, and experimentation and math-derived empirical methods. The evolutionary mechanisms, produced inferencing mechanisms, that could recursively turn around and see "what is" by way of refining inferencing mechanisms in the scientific/math-derived methodology which is confirmed through the explanatory and technological power that it produces versus other methodologies of our inferencing abilities.
This probably works better in a diagram of sorts:
Constraints interacting in a system (more complicated than this though as we agree) >>>
Instincts (in other animals) which are patterns of behavior at in part or wholly brought about through some sort of evolutionary mechanism (natural/sexual selection/exaptation, etc.)
OR
inferencing/pattern-recognition (less innate patterns of behavior more recognition of patterns to survive)>>>>
Refined pattern-recognition through accumulated cultural knowledge (though contingently learned) has "hit upon" more accurate pattern-recognition of the natural world that gave rose to the pattern-recognition.
Essentially the meta-theory here is that BECAUSE of the patterns of the world, it necessitates that creatures had to be good at recognizing patterns to survive (if not instinctual following of modules of behavior). Science works because we have that initial inferencing, but we don't need specifically, modern science to survive. The patterns of the world have revealed "what is" through turning our inferencing abilities on the world itself, with a mechanism that was created from inferencing in general.
I know this is highly contrary to Wittgenstein, but that is my point. Math works not because it "has to work" in the internal logic, when it is applied to empirical evidence and technology. It works, because there is something about how it is describing the very patterns that we initially used to recognize more practical or immediate situations in our development.
I don't see how "what serves a purpose" tells us "what is". What if all the patterns which human beings come up with are imaginary, fabrications, and the universe is just a program which rewards people for coming up with imaginative patterns? Coming up with an imaginative pattern serves the purpose, it produces the reward, the universe behaves according to the pattern created, so the person is rewarded by this. But this really doesn't tell us anything about "what is", and that is the system which hands out the rewards for the creation of imaginative patterns. The "universe" as we know it may have been created by evolving living creatures imagining patterns, and getting rewarded for this, by the system.
Yes this gets to the heart of speculation in general about the ontology of the world. I actually agree more than I disagree here. This thread was trying to add some sort of Pythagorean realism- the math actually "tells us" something beyond our epistemological understanding. Patterns recognizing patterns because pattern-recognition is itself a pattern that "works" for survival seemed interesting avenue to explore. Again, a high symmetry and formalism. Evolution is much messier than this, but it may fit into that scheme. Traits use what has came before, what is expedient. It follows a trajectory of its own constraints. But it can generally be used that, if something is not right about what fits for survival, than it is not going to last long, and that itself is a mechanism that can lead to pattern-recognition in a species with general learning capabilities.
The Speculative Realist crew, is much more, well, speculative. All of these philosophies probably fail to answer questions like the Hard Question of Consciousness. What it's going to come up with is what idealism is going to come with- a sort of panpscyhsism or hidden dualism, though more sophisticated, because of the "process" variety. Somehow by smearing consciousness over time and with "behavior" this jumps the abyss to the other side. It just gets sublimated into still other inaccessible ideas.
I'm interested in how our inferencing power, when formalized to the degree we have gotten it, has given us the minutia mongering that we have today.
The point is that Wittgenstein is not interested in explaining the "source" of regularities in nature. It's taken as a brute fact that they exist. Not only he's not interested in such "explanations", he seems to think that it's not philosophy's business in general. If the source of natural regularities is an empirical question, it's science's business; if it's not an empirical question, most probably it falls within the domain of a mystery which many try to explain by another mystery or: "a nothing could serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said".
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think this is contrary to Wittgenstein. Natural regularities constrain human behaviour, so human behaviour presents its own regularities. Math rests on these. But it's of a different order than these: "Here we see two kinds of responsibility. One may be called "mathematical responsibility": the sense in which one proposition is responsible to another. Given certain principles and laws of deduction, you can say certain things and not others. - But it is a totally different thing if we ask, "And now what's all this responsible to?"
The last part of this quote seems like an allusion to another distinction: "We must distinguish between a necessity in the system and a necessity of the whole system".
There are necessities within our mathematical system, but the system itself is not necessary. I don't see him as a conventionalist either regarding math or logic (or, I should say, especially regarding logic): "it has often been put in the form of an assertion that the truths of logic are determined by a consensus of opinions. Is this what I am saying? No". Given the world we live in, that's the math we can have. There's not a whole lot to say about "why this world" though. I take him to hold that (in its metaphysical depth (or shallowness rather)) this is a nonsensical question which produces nonsensical explanations.
Good luck getting through to Schop on these points.
Right, hence me opening this thread about Wittgenstein and his relation with ontological speculation and science itself. This is a good answer. However, within the very belief here "philosophy doesn't say something that is in the realm of empiricism/scientific explanation" the question still remains as to the "why" of the regularities. Saying, "Wittgenstein just isn't interested" is shoving off any philosophical debate into "it's just brute fact" which in that case, makes sense why people often put Witty under "non-philosophy" or "anti-philosophy".
Any speculation is shrugged off. Thus, all that's left is to describe various contexts of language use. Great, all debates off. Let's just shut the forum down, all philosophical inquiry should be under creative writing/religion sections, and we can focus on something else now. That is the implication here. That there are "brute facts" begs the question- point lost for Witty then, as this cannot be explained, and he is not willing to even "go there" other than to say it is a limit, and all limits should not be crossed (pace famous quote about nothing can explain what cannot be said". Also a limit is human nature itself which "empiricism" as a blunt approach is not going to elucidate. Again, more room for philosophy. It seems more of trapping the fly and gluing it shut, then letting it free.
Quoting 2019
Right, I was connecting the two- that was the speculative leap.
Quoting 2019
Not nonsensical- not empirically verifiable. Rather logical connections can be made, but they are never verified. At the end of the day, Witty is being a skeptic who honors the methods of empiricism for what is useful to humans. Ironically, his quote about not speaking of where one cannot, is inspired by Schopenhauer who did all sorts of metaphysical speculations.
These do seem like good criticisms of one questionable interpretation of Wittgenstein. For me the use of Wittgenstein is going through the issues again and eliminating some of them as pointless. A person is more wary of their tendency to say nothing important as if it were profound, drunk on the jingle of their words. After his basic linguistic insights are digested, his more metaphysical/mystical ideas in the TLP become more fascinating. You mention brute fact. Well perhaps we do eventually bump up against brute fact (and is this not an old issue in philosophy?)
Here's a quote that I hope addresses your concern. You are echoing Gellner's frustration, I think.
[quote=link]
Throughout his career, Gellner depicted Wittgenstein as a relativist who claimed that all conceptual schemes are equally valid, and who therefore represents "one of the most bizarre and extreme forms of irrationalism of our time" (Gellner 1992: 121). To do this, he used a strict adherence to the fideist conception of Wittgenstein’s notions of "form of life" and "language-games," according to which these notions can be invoked in justifying any political, social or religious view. For Gellner, language-games are windowless monads that fight each other without even really knowing what they fight. He once claimed, when interviewed as an anthropologist, that the Wittgensteinian notion of a form of life "doesn’t make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other" (Davis 1991: 65). Shortly before his death, he summed up his position on forms of life:
[T]he most important events of human history — the emergence of abstract doctrinal religion, the possibility of Reformations which invoke abstract truth against social practice, the possibility of an Enlightenment which does the same in secular terms, the emergence of a trans-cultural science confirmed by a uniquely powerful technology — all these facts show that thought is not limited by the form of life in which it occurs, but can transcend it.
(Gellner 1996: 671)
But Gellner never even tries to show exactly where Wittgenstein disagreed. He never stops to consider the possibility that the Wittgensteinian notion of "form of life" might include elements opposed to each other that interact and compete in the most complex ways. In an exceptionally conciliatory mood, he once wrote: "All that needs to be added to Wittgenstein’s view to the effect that concepts are legitimated by their role in the living system of which they are part, is … that this world contains more than one culture, and that the various cultures found in it differ quite a lot" (Gellner 1968d: 457). He never manages to show where Wittgenstein tries to deny or even play down this fact. Neither is there a sign in Words and Things of a realization that a Wittgensteinian language-game can be criticized, rejected or condemned in any other Wittgensteinian language-game, even one played within the same form of life.
[/quote]
Here's a quote from Wittgenstein's diary, too:
[quote=Wittgenstein]
Are we dealing with mistakes and difficulties that are as old as language? Are they, so to speak, illnesses that are tied to a language’s use, or are they of a more special nature, peculiar to our civilization?
Or again: is the preoccupation with language, which permeates our whole philosophy, an age old move of all philosophizing //of all philosophy//, an age old struggle? Or, again, is this it: does philosophizing always waver between metaphysics and critique of language?
[/quote]
https://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/tuschano/writings/strange/
It is not that he calls Wittgenstein an empiricist but that, contrary to Wittgenstein, the empirical should not be regarded as beyond the bounds of philosophy.
Where did you get that I called Witty an empiricist? Don't see it in my last post, though I mentioned the word empiricism. Making straw there Street and boxing shadows- an exercise in arrogance more than anything. I said several things about Witty but not that. I said:
Quoting schopenhauer1
So if you have a disagreement there, without misconstruing it, go ahead. I also said:
Quoting schopenhauer1
IN RESPONSE TO:
Quoting 2019
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes! This is essentially what I intended to convey there. But you probably weren't looking for strawmen to begin with, so you can at least see it.
Yes, I never stated nor believe Wittgenstein's whole project should be discounted. I think clarifying concepts is important in philosophy, and Witty understand that as one of the most important contributions. When we are talking about concepts of the "absolute", "free will", "dasein", "perfect duty", etc. etc. These are all jargony terms and have to be clarified in their contexts. I don't believe every jargony term is senseless. It has their uses.
Here is something for you, and I'm going to keep this very broad for a reason- what is Schopenhauer's conception of Will to you and to Witty (or how you conceive Witty to have thought of it based on his philosophy)?
What do the issues of existential "radical freedom", suffering (specific cases and the general idea of human suffering), and Camus' idea of Sisyphus' mean to Witty and yourself? Are they just nonsensical? Are they valid in its context-dependency? Are they something which should not be spoken? Simply poetry? Saying something about the world? What would saying anything about the world mean to Witty and yourself? You can answer with Tractatus, PI, both, none, your own thing, I don't care. I'd like to see constructive statements rather than scoffery. But scoffery about being called out on scoffery does not negate the scoffery for you (sad face). Heaping piles of scoffery just add to it unfortunately.
Sure, but what strikes me as absurd is that the admission of the limits of Wittgenstein's inquiries are then called upon as a critique of them; as if one were to say: "what I say does not apply to X"; only to be responded with: "Ha, look! What you say does not apply to X!, therefore, what you say has nothing to say about X!"; To which one can only reply: of course you fucking imbecile.
---
I've nothing to say about Witty and Schopenhauer as their relation doesn't interest me. I do recall a well known remark by Witty on Schop though, though I mention it only for trivia's sake, and I make nothing philosophical of it: "One could call Schopenhauer an altogether crude mind. I.e., he does have refinement, but at a certain level this suddenly comes to an end and he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his finishes." (Witty, Culture and Value)
Can we separate ontology and epistemology? If I make ontological claims, you will want me to justify them. But it's hard to imagine justifying anything without some things. And kind of system has to be in place for us to talk epistemology or ontology? What do we assume (though not clearly or consciously) in order to debate anything theoretical? In this case at least that we share in the meaning well enough of 'ontology' and 'epistemology' in this living context.
[quote=On Certainty]
"A is a physical object" is a piece of instruction which we give only to someone who doesn't yet understand either what "A" means, or what "physical object" means. Thus it is instruction about the use of words, and "physical object" is a logical concept. (Like colour, quantity,...) And that is why no such proposition as: "There are physical objects" can be formulated.
...,
It is quite sure that motor cars don't grow out of the earth. We feel that if someone could
believe the contrary he could believe everything that we say is untrue, and could question
everything that we hold to be sure.
But how does this one belief hang together with all the rest?
We should like to say that someone who could believe that does not accept our whole system of verification.
This system is something that a human being acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say "learns."
...
If my name is not L.W., how can I rely on what is meant by "true" and "false"?
If something happened (such as someone telling me something) calculated to make me
doubtful of my own name, there would certainly also be something that made the grounds of these doubts themselves seem doubtful, and I could therefore decide to retain my old belief.
...
Admittedly, if you are obeying the order "Bring me a book", you may have to check whether
the thing you see over there really is a book, but then you do at least know what people mean by a "book"; and if you don't you can look it up, - but then you must know what some other word means.
And the fact that a word means such-and-such, is used in such-and-such a way, is in turn an
empirical fact, like the fact that what you see over there is a book.
Therefore, in order for you to be able to carry out an order there must be some empirical fact about which you are not in doubt. Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt.
...
"If my memory deceives me here it can deceive me everywhere."
If I don't know that, how do I know if my words mean what I believe they mean?
"If this deceives me, what does 'deceive' mean any more?"
What can I rely on?
I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something
(I did not say "can trust something").
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Just to be clear, I wasn't reading you as anti-Wittgenstein.
Also I'm not anti-jargon in general. Jargon is just one of those things that can go wrong. Seems to me like a question of targeting. What is important? What is secondary? Is anything really being said? Is it being dressed up to look more difficult and novel than it is?
I'm reading Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff). It's great. Lakoff doesn't connect what he's saying to the philosophers he reminds me of, but the book is philosophy in its ambition and content. It's like Heidegger w/o a trace of the questionable style. It's not that jargony philosophy hasn't been great. It's just impressive when someone can employ the words already at hand. It's like they are resisting the urge to sign everything.
I agree, except he succeeded well enough for you to grasp what he was aiming at.